It ultimately won’t be this Friday. The American Columbia University has postponed the deadline for pro-Palestinian students to evacuate the campus, occupied to protest against the war in Gaza.
The office of the president of the New York university, where the movement started more than a week ago, returned to the deadline of midnight local time (i.e. 6 a.m. in France this Friday morning), set to dismantle a tent city where some 200 students had gathered.
“Negotiations have progressed and are continuing as planned,” said the office of university president Minouche Shafik in a statement released late Thursday evening. “We have our requests, they have theirs,” continues the presidential office, denying that police intervention was requested.
“They call us terrorists, they call us violent. But the only tool we have is our voices,” said one of the students present at the pro-Palestinian rally, introducing herself under the name Mimi.
A widespread movement
The pro-Palestinian American student movement started from Columbia University in New York. Dozens of arrests were made there last week after university officials used the police to put an end to an occupation accused by several figures of fueling anti-Semitism. Protests then continued on campus on Wednesday.
Since then, the student movement has become widespread. Some of the most prestigious universities in the world are affected, such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton. More than 200 protesters were arrested Wednesday and Thursday at universities in Los Angeles, Boston and Austin, Texas, where some 2,000 people gathered again on Thursday.
A new encampment has been set up on the campus of George Washington University in the capital. At UCLA University in Los Angeles, more than 200 students set up a mini-village of around thirty tents, barricaded by pallets and signs.
Kaia Shah, a 23-year-old political science student, expressed enthusiasm about the expansion of the movement to AFP. “It’s great what we’re seeing on other campuses,” she said, “it shows how many people support this cause.” For Kit Belgium, a professor at the University of Austin, the campus needs to see “free expression and the free exchange of ideas.” “And if the university cannot tolerate this, then it is not worthy of the name,” she adds to AFP.
Biden ‘supports free speech’
Near the pro-Palestinian rally, around thirty students organized a counter-demonstration. Jasmine Rad, a Jewish student at the University of Texas, says demonstrations in support of Gaza are “dangerous for Jewish students.” Same echo at George Washington University in the capital. “I have never been more afraid of being Jewish in America than I am now. Some students are there with hate messages, messages that call for violence,” says Skyler Sieradsky, 21, a philosophy and political science student.
The demonstrators, including a number of Jewish students, refute any anti-Semitism and criticize officials who equate it with opposition to Israel. “The people who are here come from diverse backgrounds to support the Palestinian people,” driven by “their sense of justice,” says a University of Austin graduate, who identifies as Jewish and goes by the first name Josh to the AFP.
The scenes across the country follow one another and are similar: students set up tents on their campuses, to denounce the military support of the United States for Israel and the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip. Then they are dislodged, often in a muscular manner, by police officers in riot gear, at the request of university management.
USC University in Los Angeles, where 93 people were arrested on Wednesday, announced Thursday the cancellation of its main graduation ceremony this year, officially due to “new security measures.”
Jason Miller, an advisor to Donald Trump, seized on the information, saying on X, that “under Joe Biden, your graduation ceremony will not be guaranteed” to take place. The White House, for its part, assures that Joe Biden, who hopes to be re-elected in November, “supports freedom of expression, debate and non-discrimination” in universities. This Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a statement along the same lines. “It is a characteristic of our democracy that our citizens make their opinions, their concerns, their anger known at any time,” he told the Chinese press while traveling in Beijing.